Tests "Timing-out"

Hello, we enroll about 11,500 students, about 40% of whom take some form of online classes, so we rely heavily on our Managed Hosting server environment (we are going to SaaS soon).

This semester, we have seen an unusually high number of reports to the IT Help Desk that the following condition has happened to online students: "during Test, connection to the server is lost abruptly and w/o error message, causing test to be submitted incomplete"

We have reported this several times to Behind the Blackboard, performed a server audit, found no unusual logs, and no maintenance work was performed.

Wondering if any Community members have experienced an uptick with this issues this semester as well?

It cannot be "just the student's wifi connection," although most of the students are accessing the Test from off-campus, the mounting evidence points to something more than that explanation

We had a similar situation. We were using a single sign on authentication, which was fine EXCEPT that, after about 30 minutes of taking a test, the authentication server booted out the student because of inactivity. Bb activity didn't ping on the authentication server.

When that was changed back to whatever it was before SSO, the problem resolved. Worth looking at if you're using a SSO system. I can get more details from our ITS folks if you need them.

Hallie - thank you for reply : ) I would very much appreciate, if you are able, to learn more about any CAS authentication issues, specifically a 30 minute period of online BB inactivity [test taking as an example] during which CAS and BB do not ping each other, resulting in a disconnection from the BB server, losing the test un-submitted - I'm happy to talk with your ITS folks, if they like - Thank you!